• U.S.

GUATEMALA: We Are Not Amused

3 minute read
TIME

Into Guatemala City last week flew U. S. Minister Sheldon Whitehouse.

“We are not amused,” was what President Hoover was saying, not in so many words but in effect, about the recent monkeyshines in Guatemala (TIME, Dec. 29). It was Mr. Whitehouse’s job to put a straight and sober face on the revolution.

This could best be done by forcing the successful revolutionist, General Manuel Orellana, to resign as president of Guatemala. The joke of the whole business was of course not that Revolutionist Orellana had seized the presidency but that he had seized it from one Baudilio Palma who obtained it the week before from original President Lazaro Chacon. The joke which Washington wanted uncracked was that Washington had recognized the second of Guatemala’s three successive presidents.

Christopher Columbus performed the impossible feat of making an egg stand on one end by slightly cracking and flattening that end of the eggshell. Sheldon Whitehouse, by means equally simple and direct, un-cracked the Guatemalan joke.

To the No. 3 president he went, told him that the U. S. would never recognize his government, told him that he must resign. At such personal encounters with Latins Mr. Whitehouse is rather good. In Paris and later at Madrid he handled successfully, as counselor of embassy, much tougher men than a No. 3 president of a third-class power.

The trick is to look like a “white spat boy,” for diplomacy is a white spat game; but to act with inflexible firmness and more than sufficient tact. Tactfully Minister Whitehouse gave the No. 3 president an “out,” explained that for him to remain in office would be contrary to “The Treaty of 1923.” What the treaty.is all about was comparatively immaterial.* The No. 3 president, who had not scrupled to ignore the Guatemalan constitution, was presumably not squeamish about scraps of paper. He took 24 hours to think over the impression made on him by Minister Whitehouse, then resigned.

The joke was now almost back into its shell, the shell almost perfectly patched up. Finishing touches were added by the Guatemalan assembly which named a (4th) president pro tempore, Dr. Jose Maria Reina Andrade. To the press Minister Whitehouse indicated that this arrangement is eminently satisfactory, for a quick election will be held, an unquestionably constitutional (5th) president chosen.

* Within the next fortnight Secretary of State Henry Lewis Stimson will, according to a State Department hint, expound in a public speech this treaty, which the U. S. never signed.

Signed by five Central American Republics, it binds them not to recognize a government in one of their countries which has seized power by unconstitutional means. It was Charles Evans Hughes who established the precedent of acting as though the U. S. were bound by this treaty, using it as a formula to determine whether the U. S. should or should not recognize new regimes in Central America.

Since Panama was not one of the five Central American signatories, Mr. Stimson is believed to hold that with respect to Panama the U. S. need not follow the Hughes precedent (see p. 18). But only a Stimson speech can clarify with authority a subject so involved and nebulous that (with respect to the U. S.) it exists only in statesmen’s imaginations.

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